Page 238 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

Variation 8: Rather than using groups of five notes, this piece uses groups of ten or eleven notes. It has hand crossings as well, but this time the hands cheat even more cleverly, duetting with the other hand’s scales. This is easy to do if you have two keyboards, as on a dual-manual harpsichord, but your fingers can get tripped up when you play it on a piano, because the fingers have to be so close to one another.
Variation 9 Canone alla Terza: This is almost an interlude, when everyone is free to dream. One hand copies the other, but in a courtly, polite slow dance.
Variation 10 Fughetta: This is a four-voice fugue. You can hear the original theme; then it’s repeated in the left hand. Glenn Gould felt that four voices were the most that the mind (or the hands) could keep track of all at once.
The initial trill from the original theme is a good way to keep track of when the second voice comes in, because its long trill alerts you. Despite how busy it is, notice what beauty is created. This is always the challenge: to make the technical difficulties disappear in favor of simply having a good time with the harmonies. You have to reveal the struc- ture, which is the point of all German music: “form’s what affirms,” as James Merrill has said. But at the same time you have to forget the structure, and enjoy the hedonism of the song. It is reason versus passion. The two must combine. T.S. Eliot felt that we lost our anchor to the earth when we separated the two hemispheres of the brain into warring entities, rather than cooperative teams.
Variation 11: Here Bach expands the first note of the theme into seven notes, but keeps the trill at the end, the goal of the earlier notes. Bach uses reverse motion scales, pauses, and syncopations to keep it interesting.
Variation 12 Canone alla Quarta: All the scales here shelter hidden patterns where each group’s first or last note becomes a melody of its own, so that the original theme’s harmonic
structure, its chords, are used as a melody. Rock and roll and bebop use chord progressions as melodies as well.
Variation 13: Here the ornaments themselves are the point, and the harmonies are used as modulations which lead to the next ornament, or appoggiatura. The complex ornamented figures gradually morph into the scales themselves, so you can tell, and even feel, how both the decoration and the underlying harmonies and the linking scales are all the same thing, each disguised as the other. This is an extraordinary revelation, where Bach shows how even a few seconds of a passage is composed of the same three basic elements, the way the earth is composed of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, rearranged in a hundred ways; the way the materials of stars have also shaped the earth. If you listen to this piece enough, suddenly it dawns on you: one part of it is derived from the part before, and so on.
Variation 14: And this virtuoso amalgam of trills, synco- pations, and silences is your reward. It may be the same formula as all the other variations so far, but it’s infectious. It shows how all of the elements that are so serious can also be fun. This is the most virtuosic and explosive variation.
Variation 15 Canone alla Quinta: Andante: The pianist Glenn Gould called this “the perfect Good Friday spell.” It puts the previous variation, which was so effervescent, in its place. We realize here that serious ecclesiastic codes can be woven from the same DNA as pleasure. It is the ultimate merging of the two spheres of the brain: the music of the spheres.
The physical and the metamorphic: things that exist and things that vaporize, both merging into the metaphysical, metaphors that start in the flesh and rapidly transmute into more ethereal airs, lead turning into gold. Prayer turning into heaven itself. It’s the opposite of what Claudius, the evil king, says in the play Hamlet: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
But if physical words can somehow combine with incor- poreal thoughts, the result is catharsis, magic, redemption,
238 The Music at Tippet Rise